Charged EVs | New silver plating busbar line adds 4,500 tons/year of UK capacity for EV systems
Karas Plating has brought a new £1.5-million automated busbar electroplating line online in the UK, adding what the company says is the country’s widest-capacity silver-plating operation for copper busbars—components used in EV battery packs, power electronics and charging stations.
The new 2.4-meter-wide line can process up to 200 kg of product every 20 minutes and adds capacity to plate an additional 4,500 tonnes of copper busbars per year, according to the company. Karas says it can handle components up to 4.2 meters long.
Busbars sit in a critical part of the powertrain and charging stack: moving high currents between cells, modules, inverters and charging hardware with minimal loss.
As Karas notes in a recent technical blog post, silver plating is widely used on EV busbars because it lowers contact resistance, improves current-carrying capability, stabilizes joints under vibration and thermal cycling and helps maintain low-resistance connections over repeated charge-discharge cycles. The company says silver plating can support both copper and aluminum busbars, the latter being increasingly attractive where weight reduction matters.
The new line is a reshoring move that reduces reliance on overseas electroplating while giving UK manufacturers tighter process control and shorter supply chains. Managing Director Alan Pennington said the automated line operates as an autonomous cell using LEAN principles and KPI-based process control to improve consistency and reduce silver consumption, and that Karas is achieving a defect rate of fewer than five parts per million.
Source: Karas Plating
